Quotes from Henry David Thoreau

One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government

We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other's hopes. They are kind to each other's dreams.

We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves, that there may be grounds enough for friendship.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!

What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!

My Friend is that one whom I can associate with my choicest thought.

Our actual Friends are but distant relations of those to whom we are pledged.

I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room. I have only tacked a few times and come to anchor - not sailed - made no voyage, carried no venture.

There are times when we have had enough even of our Friends.

There is not so good an understanding between any two but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.